CRWROPPS Post: $2800 Short Fiction Prize, flash contest winners, and the latest from CRAFT

Guest Judge: Alexander Chee
Deadline: April 30, 2020, Midnight PST

The 2020 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize is closing soon. Make sure to submit your original fiction up to 5,000 words. Three winners will be selected by guest judge Alexander Chee, with $2800 awarded. Each winner receives publication with a written introduction by the judge; first place also wins a subscription to Journal of the Month. We look forward to reading your work!

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Winners of the 2019 CRAFT Flash Fiction Contest Judged by Benjamin Percy

"How to Return Your Child to School" by Hillary Smith

He'll want the Moana one with zippers like cresting waves and straps that glisten blue plastic glitz. He'll cry that Michelle Naylor's mom let her buy that one in purple. You've only met Michelle Naylor's mom once, at family fun night last September. All you remember is a tinny voice and the hot stench of lavender oil.

Be firm. Take his hand, moist and squirming in yours, and pull him down the other aisle. The imposed structure and muted colors of these racks will crumple his flushed cheeks but you'll grab the loudest shade, the green of spring grass, and slip his fingers over the mesh straps. Dance the bag into his arms, show him the secret pockets tucked into the belly of the main pouch and let him feel the cool lips of the zippers, shaped almost like dragon mouths if he looks close enough. When he asks why the back is so hard, tell him there's a special panel to keep him extra safe. It will feel comfy after a little while.

"Girls' Weekend" by Steven Simoncic

A hunk of butter hits the fry pan. Then two pieces of bologna. Sparks of grease jump and sizzle. My dad's hands—massive, oil-stained, almost old—slash tiny gashes into the bubbles of perfectly pink meat. White bread and yellow mustard sit in silence at the kitchen table. So do I. Bleeding. A stubborn trickle running from my nose to my mouth. I press a wad of spotted toilet paper to my face, trying to remember the details of the fight. How Todd Lorenze called me fat again and how—even though he's an eighth-grader—I bull rushed him into the chain link fence out behind the little gym, and how he sucker punched me on the way down, tagging me right in the nose, and how everybody knew I got the best of his wiry burnout ass, and even though I was the one bleeding, Todd-fucking-Lorenze knows not to fuck with me again. This is the story I told my father. The one that made him smile. The one that is a complete lie.

"Epilogue" by Carol M. Quinn

They staggered, stunned, into the fall, she and Teddy making giant vats of pasta and vegetarian burrito dinners to feed twenty-five, inviting home everyone they knew to eat, to drink, to stay over, please, we have a futon and warm, inviting beds. Sometimes they changed the sheets. Occasionally there were drugs. Every night a party, plastic cups with first names and last initials scrawled in permanent marker crowding the table, the countertop, the arms of the futon, the bathroom sink. So many parties. A week of parties, a month of parties. Parties that wanted to be last week's parties, last month's, last year's; The Strokes and Weezer and the Hedwig soundtrack on the CD player, a towel at the foot of the door to contain the pot, the noise, the desperation. Disorienting, to stand on the roof and smoke cigarettes after midnight, at first in T-shirts, later in hoodies and then jackets and scarves, gloves with the fingers cut off, staring resolutely only to the right and the still-shining Empire State Building, lighted now at all hours to provide such things as hope and inspiration to the men and women a few blocks away who were doing what, exactly? digging? sorting? tagging?

ICYMI

In February we brought you the winners of the 2019 CRAFT First Chapters Contest, and in April we've published all the winners of the 2019 CRAFT Flash Fiction Contest.

Catch up on our recent short stories and flash fiction:

· With command of pacing, descriptive language—"They looked like they'd grown together, he and that dog, like one of those big, gnarled lumps you sometimes see on the trunk of a tree"—place, and character arc, Craig Bernardini writes from a fresh perspective on dogs and men in "Trees Go to Heaven."

· The combination of captivating tone, propulsive pacing, and realistically rendered characters, full of contradiction and flaws, drives M. K. Anderson's "Cedar Court, 2011," set in Austin ("a good place to be poor but never feel used, never humiliated") in the "twilight of the slacker years."

· Kathryn McMahon's flash fiction "The Color It Leaves Behind" rejects the male gaze and centers homelife, communication, and intimacy between queer women while giving us an object lesson through a pet rock: "A cold lump of gray with googly eyes, a feather headband, and a red glitter mouth."

And not to be missed, our recent craft essays and interviews include examinations of the work of contemporary fiction masters Rachel Cusk, Sarah Rose Etter, Madeline ffitch, Alice Mattison, and David Means.

New Hybrid Interview: Amber Sparks

Throughout these twenty-two stories, women are the heroes, women are the characters who stay grounded, women are the characters who don't flee the scene, who take the conflicts head-on and with gusto, who spend their energy righting this ship. The intensity from each protagonist is energizing and awesome, but what truly slays about Sparks's stories is how she tackles these issues while retaining the love and humor, exposing every injustice, every important inequity, every worthwhile battle, without losing the magic. —J. A. Tyler

xxx
J. A. Tyler: Obviously, you like working with short stories, and you're tremendously skilled at it. What comforts do you find in the short story form?

Amber Sparks: Well, thanks! I do worry about never being able to write a proper novel because I'm a short-story writer at heart. I don't think it's "comforts" so much as the opposite: challenge. Each story can use entirely new forms, create new worlds, push boundaries in different ways that are fun and playful and that I don't think exhaust the reader in the same way that a novel might.